News, Views and Analysis

Making the case for female literacy

A polished turd (shiny! eww) from @DavidWarrenOn has distracted me from writing a long-winded post about the whole reasonable accommodations panic that seems to have seized Canada, despite the fact that it started more or less as yet another PQ attempt at exorcising the ghost of PET. Our old friend David Warren seems to have written a recent blog…disquisition — “post” is the wrong word; since he has apparently been disgorged by the Citizen, his now-less-edited expostulations are even more Crossharbouristic than they previously were — on, wait for it, CIVILISATIONAL DOWNFALL, which as everyone knows is his personal monomania.

Curiously enough, Goldman homes in on a statistical fact that Roberts elided. It is that a sharply increasing female literacy rate is a more or less infallible predictor of demographic collapse, in all non-Western countries. Or as I mischievously put it, on Twitter only last night, “statistically and objectively, the quickest way to destroy a nation is to teach their women to read.”

Oh you mischief-maker you, David! Seriously though, thank you for pointing out one of the huge advantages of female literacy: it may even “destroy” “our” “civilization”! Obviously, knowing this, we can only wish that people were to have discovered this advantage sooner. According to David — displaying what might once have seemed rather odd sympathy, if you’re familiar with his voluminous oeuvre — even the Muslim world, sorry, Dar al-Islam is getting in on the act!

(h/t to an LGM commenter, of all things, for reminding us of the old chap’s existence)